


alone in this desolation, we try not to flourish

by The-Immortal-Moon (LunaKat)



Series: Of Gearheaded Geeks and Alchemy Freaks (EdWin Week 2019) [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, EdWin Week 2019, F/M, Prompt Fic, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 14:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18693475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LunaKat/pseuds/The-Immortal-Moon
Summary: For Edwin Week 2019. Day 3: Your Choice (AU)She’ll never forget the way his eyes looked in Ishval. Never.





	alone in this desolation, we try not to flourish

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 503 Day! Prompt is "Your Choice" and since I'm a sucker for role reversals and AUs, my thoughts immediately jumped to this idea I've had on the back-burner for a while. Hope you enjoy!

First Lieutenant Winry Rockbell gives her superior’s door a firm knock with the crown of her knuckles. There is no muffled shout that answers her—no “come in” or “come back later” or even an “I’m busy, go away”. She takes this as a tacit invitation to enter.

As she eases the door open, slowly so as not to disturb the colonel in case he’s in the middle of something, she finds him scowling down at a dossier that is spread out across the length of his desk. It forms a shallow plane between the veritable mountains of paperwork that enclose upon either side, leaving this valley as a sole refuge from clutter. Whatever information the documents contain, it is enough to warrant the twist of displeasure in her superior’s mouth and the exasperated furrow in his brow and the annoyed glare that takes residence in eyes. With a snort, he snaps the manila file closed.

Careful not to disturb him, she ferries the mug of coffee—dark roast, with  _six_  spoonfuls of sugar, because he has a fiendish sweet tooth, but _no_ milk or cream _under any circumstances_ —over to his desk. Unfortunately, the act of her setting it down catches his attention. Topaz-hued eyes darts up to briefly address her presence, then flick over to the mug.

“Is that coffee?”

She nods. “Rosé made some for everyone.”

Excitement gleams in his eye, like a child unwrapping a present, but it’s quickly tempered by his diligence to his paperwork. As he reaches out to take the mug and sip leisurely from it, gaze already drifting back to the mountainous piles on either side of his desk, Winry notices that his honey-hued braid is thrown over his shoulder rather than streaming down his back. It’s done a little more sloppily than she’s usually seen it, and there’s a quality about the bangs framing his face that suggests they were recently tease by exasperated fingers.

Then Colonel Edward Elric, the legendary Fullmetal Alchemist, sets the mug back down, satisfied. “That woman is a goddamn gift to this office. Tell her that next time you see her.”

Winry rolls her eyes. At the moment, Sergeant Rosé Thomas only serves them in a secretarial capacity, but she is the best kind of secretary—one who continuously locks up the office after everyone leaves and turns out the lights and refills the ink in the pens, though sometimes Winry suspects she is the only one who notices. And it would be really nice if someone other than her gave Sergeant Thomas the respect she deserved. “Tell her yourself.”

He grimaces at that. “Can’t. M’supposed to be an asshole, and assholes don’t thank people.”

Right, right. His cover. Presenting to the world a contentious man, impertinent and insubordinate and far too immature to handle his position as it is. A hot-blooded youth with too little experience under his belt and too much hunger for glory to truly have a mind for battle—at least, not at a seat in the war room planning stratagems. Certainly one that does not deserve his current rank, could not earn it without some degree of favoritism.

Which is exactly what they want people to think.

And sure, Ed isn’t, admittedly, the most diplomatic of individuals, and he may hold a certain fondness for independence that is good for an alchemist but bad for a soldier. But most forget that most of being an alchemist comes from insane intelligence. They forget that it takes skill and cunning and creativity to get where someone like Ed is, especially given the fact that he is by far one of the youngest officers in the military to outrank a captain. Above all, they forget that alchemists are creatures that hunger for knowledge—that true alchemists learn and grow and adapt, and they notice more than they let on.

Which is exactly why they need people to think he isn’t as capable as he is.

Diplomatic, no, and rather inclined to grumble about the idiocies of politics in addition. But he knows how to play along, recognizes the importance and necessity of it even if he is unwilling to admit it. Most of the time, it is merely a matter of willingness.

“Well,” Winry says, clucking her tongue. “You’d know.”

“Oh, hardy har har, you’re  _so_  funny.” He flashes a smile that looks more like a wolf baring its fangs, then takes another sip of coffee.

Rolling her eyes, she reaches out to tap insistently at the dossier he snapped closed. “So. What’s got you so irritated at a few sheets of paper?”

His grimace resurfaces, and he glowers down at the coffee mug as though it is somehow responsible for all his woe. “Bradley wants us to take a little trip to Central on account of a potential terrorist attack.”

“Central, huh?” It’s been a while since they spent time in the country’s capital. Not since they first got stationed out in East City, come to think of it. Then again, she kind of got the impression that the top brass weren’t so eager to call Ed back, with his temperament and all. “Should I pack an overnight bag?”

“Might be more than an overnight bag,” Ed grumbles, reaching up to massage his temple with one hand.

That doesn’t sound good. “And here I thought you’d be excited about being invited back to Central. Getting to show off and potentially embarrass the Top Brass and all.”

Grunting, he sets the mug down, then leans back in his chair. He keeps massaging at his temple. “His _Excellency_ wants to get  _Flame_  involved.”

Oh. That makes a little more sense. Anything even remotely connected to Roy Mustang—the sixteen-year-old Flame Alchemist that had somehow fallen into Ed’s command a couple years back, much to everyone’s surprise, including Ed himself—tends to rankle him and sour his mood. Even now, he has a twist in his mouth that makes it look as though he’s sucked a lemon wedge.

In fairness, Mustang has a similar aversion to Ed, and the two do bicker with one another for hours on end over who is more useless and who’s shorter and who has a bigger temper and just... Yeah. Perhaps the only bright side to it all is that Winry gets to hold pleasant conversation with Riza Hawkeye, who is far more mild-tempered than her blustery companion.

“I’m sure you’ll survive,” Winry says, even as she makes a mental note to bring some paperwork with them so that Ed will have an excuse not to spend hours on end in a verbal sparring match with a teenager.

But his scowl only deepens. “Yeah, but they think the security threat might involve McDougal.”

“...I’m not following.”

That seems to surprise him. “You don’t remember McDougal?”

“Ed, I was in the medic’s tent,” she reminds him flatly, crossing her arms. “Not the battlefield.”

“Right.” He looks sheepish for a moment, but the dissatisfied scowl steals it away a moment later. “Isaac McDougal used to be the Freezing Alchemist. His specialty was the speed with which he could transmute and weaponize water.”

Ah. Of  _course_. Roy Mustang, Flame Alchemist—his entire battle strategy relies almost solely on the ability make sparks. Riza has complained about her companion’s lack of versatility in the past, and how she wishes he’d start carrying around spare gloves so that he wouldn’t be rendered utterly defenseless.

She side-eyes Ed and his grumpy scowl as he grabs his mug for another shot of caffeine. Say what you will about the way he and Mustang rile each other up to high heaven, but Ed is nothing if not sympathetic to the kid’s plight—even if he’s unnecessarily recalcitrant about his refusal to admit it, for some unfathomable reason. Maybe he’s just trying to keep the Top Brass from figuring out how many damns he actually gives about his youngest subordinate.

“I’m sure Roy will be fine,” Winry says.

“He’s gonna die.”

“Riza will keep him alive.”

“I think his stupidity far surpasses Riza’s practicality.”

Winry rolls her eyes, planting one hand on her hip. “Mustang’s actually pretty capable, you know.”

This causes Ed to snap around so sharply she actually hears his neck crick. His eyes  _burn_. “ _Roy Mustang_ is a smug, pompous little  _bastard_  who has cost this unit more than  _seven-hundred thousand cenz_  worth of property damage  _this year alone_. The only thing he is  _capable_  of is burning down cities, collecting collateral damage like it’s going out of fucking style, and getting on my last nerve  _while he’s at it_!”

Well. No matter how sympathetic to Mustang’s situation Ed is, let it never be said that he isn’t also petty and bitter and capable of holding a grudge like it’s the only thing keeping him from falling off a cliff.

“Gee,” she drawls, “that  _sure_  sounds familiar.”

At first, he looks bewildered. But then her meaning sinks in, becomes apparent—bewilderment flashes into mortification flashes into outrage. “That is  _not_  true!”

She tilts her head to one side, taps her finger against her cheek in a gesture of feigned contemplation. “If I recall, there was a certain alchemist who ran around the country in a bright red coat and all black and casually destroyed buildings... oh  _gee_ , what  _was_  his name again—”

“I was never that short, though,” he objects, because of course  _that’s_  the thing he focuses in on. Not the tacky coat and the rampant destruction of property. Nope. Always the height.

“You’re right.” She crosses her arms and _smiles_. “ _You_ were shorter.”

The chair rattles faintly as he rises to his full height, as though to assure her that no, he is not short—not anymore. For all her life, Winry used to be the one he looked up to, had to tilt his chin even just a little bit to meet her eyes. That changed sometime when they were fifteen and he just  _had_  to shoot up like a weed and left her doing double-takes when she realized they were suddenly eye-level. By sixteen, he was the one who looked down at her, and to this day she’s still a little irritated by the fact that she’s lost ground in that regard. Sure, she holds superiority over him in several other places, and will hold those advantages over his head until the day they both die, but losing the advantage of height is something she’s never been able to make peace with.

With him standing over her now, it’s a little hard to connect the hot-tempered brat she grew up with, the one who used to wrestle with her and tease her mercilessly and then get into fist-fights whenever someone made her cry, with this grown adult who only distantly resembles him. That boy didn’t have the current Ed’s sloppy golden braid or his strong, angular jaw or the cheekbones sharp enough to cut yourself on or the broad shoulders that nicely fill out the blue military uniform.

The old Ed didn’t make her heart quicken when he stood too close, leveled her with eyes that smolder like distilled sulfur. The old Ed didn’t make her shiver.

“You’re edging dangerously close to insubordination, lieutenant.” It comes out in a mock-growl, somewhere between annoyance and amusement.

To which she grins, leaning in until their noses are touching and their breath shares the same space. “And what’re you gonna do about it, colonel?”

And that—stops it. Snips the thread prematurely. Something in his expression shifts, and he pulls away. Turns his head. Even though his bangs cast a curtain, she doesn’t need to see to know the shadows that have gathered there.

The old Ed also never set foot in Ishval, never suffered a blazing sun or sand in his automail or collapsed into her tent by mistake because he was drunk off his ass despite being under the legal drinking age. Hell—they were both too young to get dragged into a war that was far too big for them, that spread its arms wide only to crush them in its grip.

“So, we should catch the train for Central sometime this evening,” he says, in some attempt to salvage their very serious and very adult conversation—about work and the military and security threats leveled against innocent lives. “We’ll probably arrive early in the morning, maybe by dawn. Attend the briefing. Start coordinating security.”

Right. They aren’t the children they used to be.

If she closes her eyes, she wonders what she’ll feel on her face—the warm tickle of Risembool summers or the blistering heat of the desert.

Which reminds her. “I hope we wrap it up quickly, at least. I was planning to take some time off and head down to Risembool next week.”

Nostalgia flickers briefly across his face, and he tentatively turns back to her. It’s there in his eyes, too—the aching, the wishing, the wanting. The yearning to slip back into a time before their childhood was severed prematurely. Although, his ended earlier than hers.

“Visiting the old bat?” There’s a teasing note in his tone. An effort to regain their familiarity.

“Well, yeah.” It has, admittedly, been a while since Winry dropped by to visit Granny. She knows how her grandmother feels about the military, and Granny understands Winry’s reasons for donning the uniform, and they have an understanding that is steeped in the fact that they don’t discuss it.

But that’s not the only reason she’s booking a train ticket back to her— _their_ —hometown.

As Ed starts easing himself back into his chair, she adds, softly, “But Al’s birthday is coming up, too.”

The change that overcomes him is immediate—his broad shoulders hunch, his head lowers, shadows consume his expression with thousands of dark, unspoken thoughts that she knows are all heavily steeped in self-loathing, even if he will never say it aloud. She can see the tremor in his hands as he reaches out for the mug, the white fabric of his gloves creasing around the joints of tactfully hidden prosthetic fingers as they curl carefully around the handle and bring the mug closer to his face. He doesn’t take a sip. Instead, the steam just wafts faintly from the half-drained mug, traces sinuous white curls that part around his face. If she knows him at all (and she does, oh how she does), she’d guess that he’s probably using the rich aroma of it to ground him to the present, to keep his mind from slipping back into painful memories.

And then, just to make sure her meaning is absolutely clear because Ed may be a genius prodigy who learned alchemy at five but he’s also a dumbass when it comes to people, she adds, “You should come.”

“He doesn’t want me there,” he says softly, then takes a sip. His eyes look like amber shards.

“That’s not true, Ed.” The last time she attended Al’s birthday party, albeit reluctantly and mostly at the behest of Granny, she was greeted warmly, and Al expressed disappointment upon learning that his brother hadn’t accompanied her.

He looks down at his mug, and says nothing.

“You haven’t spoken to each other in five years.”

A bitter little laugh. “There’s a reason for that.”

“At least call him. Try to reconnect.”

“He  _hates_  me, Winry.”

“He doesn’t.”

Snorting, Ed sets the mug down, a little harder than necessary. The coffee sloshes, but doesn’t spill, and the ceramic clinks against the hardwood desk. “I recall him telling me that if I was going to leave, then I couldn’t come back.”

She wasn’t there during the falling out, doesn’t know exactly what words were exchanged. But she knows that Ed was a mess after Ishval, that the war left him in ruins and then deposited his crumbling self back on the doorstep without any instructions as to piece him back together. She knows that he descended into whiskey, knows that Al was scared—scared by this shattered version of a person he loved and tried to reconcile this broken thing that was too sharp and too bitter with the strong, brave older brother he’d grown up with. Knows that neither of them coped well, trying to maintain this façade of nothing changing, of everything going back to normal like the war never happened and Ed didn’t come back different. She tried that at first, too, but it didn’t work, and she knows it didn’t work for Ed either.

Most of all, she knows that Ed’s decision to return to the military was met with far more of a bitter backlash than hers.

“Maybe he’s changed his mind.” She only says “maybe” because she doesn’t want to preach, but she saw the way Al’s eyes dimmed when she told him Ed wasn’t coming, how guilt and regret made unscheduled appearances and loitered in the corner for the rest of the event.

But he shakes his head, ever the stubborn mule. Ever the martyr. “People don’t change their minds over that, Win.”

“Ed—”

And something in her tone must be too soft, too sympathetic for his taste, because he whirls around. His braid slices the air like a blade, his eyes flashing like shrapnel. “I’m a fucking  _genocide-induced mass-murderer_.”

_Demon of Ishval_ , were the murmurs that stalked his heels when he emerged battered from the warfront. Not hero, because heroes aren’t as destructive, aren’t as wild and unfettered and don’t have reputations for reducing entire cities to rubble within a matter of minutes. Even if he was on the Amestrian side, they knew his power and they knew it enough to fear it.

He knows it, too. So does she. They both know what he’s capable of even if neither of them wants to say it.

Silence falls heavy between them.

Slowly, she turns away. Starts collecting the paperwork that’s been signed off on, already filled out and just needs to be processed. In her mind’s eye, the rhythmic motion brings to mind wrapping bandages around his torso and bleeding shoulder, because the Ishvalans were lucky enough to detain him and thought of a brutally efficient way to prevent him from destroying them quickly. They didn’t know that he was capable of alchemy by more than just one method, which was ultimately their undoing—but the damage was done and Ed was sent home early and even if his reputation had been set by then, hanging heavy over the battlefield in whispers of awe and terror swapped between ally soldiers late at night over discussions on human monsters, he didn’t see the rest of the war.

Her, on the other hand. She stayed. She saw it through its bitter, terrible, twisting and splintering and ultimately breaking end.

The files are heavy in her arms. “Did I ever tell you about the testing sites?” she asks abruptly.

His expression shifts, loses its harshness. “Winry—”

“The higher ups—they were very interested in how the Ishvalans could survive such brutal heat. How they could be so stubborn.” She shakes her head, remembering the rhetoric that was passed down about how they couldn’t be human, not entirely, and the speculation among idiotic soldiers that maybe there was beastly ancestry within the brown-skinned adversaries they mowed down. “So they set up facilities. Asked the medics to participate. Except, by ‘ask’, they really meant ‘do it or we’ll shoot you on grounds of insubordination’. But you know that already.”

Of course he does. It’s one of the reasons he didn’t desert—that and his promise to come home to his brother.

“So in our free time, we were supposed to examine what it exactly it was that made these Ishvalans tick. What made them different from Amestrians—turns out, the answer? Absolutely  _nothing_ , pigment aside. Because they were  _human_. They _always_ were. We just never _treated_ them like it.”

Her eyes itch, remembering the screaming, sobbing, the fervent prayers muttered under breaths in a language she wishes she understood, if only to convey how fucking _sorry_ she was. Men and women and God, even  _children_ —bound and caged like rabid animals, their scarlet eyes brimming with hatred every time she fluttered down the halls like the ghost she was becoming every time another life flatlined beneath her hands and the person she used to be got blurrier and blurrier and blurrier.

In the present, it’s Ed’s office that’s getting blurrier, as her vision brims with tears that she dares not shed, because she no longer has the right to cry for herself. Not anymore.

“I was assigned to a medical team under Dr. Knox. I was supposed to be helping people, saving lives.” She sniffs. It’s undeserved. How dare she, when she is alive and there are so many who didn’t make it out? “But I can give you a step-by-step analysis on what happens to the human body if you deprive of sleep, or food, or water, or air, or even subject it to electric shocks or various chemicals or extreme temperatures. I can tell you exactly what systems shut down, how quickly, how it feels, how long it takes before you finally die.”

“Winry.” He says her name like a prayer, like a refrain, like a hymn and a funeral choir and a death knell all at once.

“You’re not the only murderer, Ed.”

And then he is on his feet and cupping her face in his hands. She can hear the click in his automail knees, can feel the firmness of his false fingers in comparison to the flesh ones. Sometime before Ishval tore them apart, he once told her that she saved him—but now it feels like she failed to do that, too.

Her stupid, selfish self must have allowed a tear to slip through, because she feels his thumb brush across her cheek. This close, she can see the luminous saffron color that comprises his irises—she can see the brightness that they used to have, the carelessness with which they gleamed. She remembers when they dimmed after he lost his legs and she thought that was the worse it could get, that pyrite glitter that had replaced the gold. She thought that was the extent to which someone could be broken.

But she was wrong.

She’ll never forget the way his eyes looked in Ishval. Never.

Even now, his eyes are different. The specter of the war hasn’t left, just dimmed. Leeching light and warmth from the sunshine eyes she grew up with.

Hers are probably the same.

“I’m going to fix this,” he whispers, and leans in closer. Their foreheads bump, just briefly, a reassurance passed in a fraction of a second. A fleeting moment of contact in the distance they have forged between themselves and the people they used to be. “I’ll fix the whole damn system. I promise.”

“I know,” she murmurs. Remembers how his face looked, grim and determined, when the idea first set his jaw and hardened in his gaze and he dared loose it out into the world. Remembers the day she first came into his office and introduced herself like they’d never met, saluted him stiffly.

_Keep me from becoming a monster_ , he’d asked of her.

She breathes in deeply, lets the air gust its way into her lungs and stay there, steady her. It’s been years since Ishval ended. Maybe in another life, they could lose themselves in one another—but instead they are laid with the weight of sins on their shoulders and they must move forward of become subsumed by their guilt.

Another deep breath. She shifts the files in her arms. Steps back. Wipes her eyes. They can’t share space, anymore. They can’t let themselves.

“You should prepare for the trip to Central, sir,” she says, and it’s almost pitiful how easy it is to slip into the military’s vernacular of protocol and designated ranks.

“Yeah, I guess...” All of a sudden, he starts, the vulnerability and the lingering melancholy lost to a realization that widens his eyes. He lets out an exaggerated gasp. “Oh  _shit_ — _Ling_.”

Winry arches a brow. Most of her interactions with Ling Yao are postbellum in nature, though she knows that he and Ed met on the battlefield and somehow became inseparable as a result, no matter what you would think watching them interact. Personally, she likes him just fine, finds him to be quite amiable—so much so that it hides his shrewd mind. “What about him?”

“He’s gonna drag me to a fucking restaurant, order five of the most expensive thing on the menu, and then foot  _me_  with the bill!” Ed glowers at the ceiling, as though it is a prime offender in the crime that is, apparently, his being friends with someone he claims to hate when they both know he’s feigning irritation most of the time. “ _Again_.”

Her bow arches higher. “Isn’t your salary higher than his?”

“That’s not the  _point_ ,” he snaps, and sinks back into his chair a second time. By now, the coffee she brought in for him has cooled.

“I mean, he’s a lieutenant colonel and you’re full colonel—”

“It’s the  _principle_  of the matter, dammit!”

“It doesn’t seem like a hill worth dying on.” At least Winry would get to see Lanfan when they got to Central. Sure, they kept in touch through letters and the occasional phone call, but it had been a while and she’d like to make sure the Xingese woman isn’t dodging her maintenance appointments because of some strange stubborn pride or whatever. God knows Ed used to be the same way, back when his legs were new and his stubbornness had yet to be tested by the brutal Ishvalan badlands.

His jaw drops and he stares at her with a look of utter betrayal. “You’re taking _his_ side?”

“...it’s just  _food_.”

He narrows his eyes at her, gaze simmering as he works his jaw. “I could have you court-martialled,” he says, almost thoughtfully.

“Uh huh. Okay. Good luck with that.” She turns to depart. “In the meantime, those documents over there need to be signed by one, and don’t forget your meeting with Major General Hakuro after lunch.”

“Slave-driver,” he huffs.

“Stubborn mule.”

“Gearhead.”

“Alchemy freak.”

“Shouldn’t’ve hired you.”

“The  _documents_ , Edward.”

As Winry closes the door behind her, she catches Ed’s irritated muttering and glaring at his paperwork and muses to herself that, at the very least,  _some_  things are allowed to remain.

**Author's Note:**

> So! This is part of an age-swap/role reversal AU I have in which Ed is the colonel, Roy is the alchemist seeking the Stone, Riza's the suit of armor, and Winry is Ed's first lieutenant. I've really wanted to write this for a while and I'm glad I finally get the opportunity.
> 
> I may continue on this, I may not. I'm not sure. I'm really deep into Grand Arcanum now, so I probably won't start on another longfic. If anything, I'd do a series of one-shots that might take place within this AU, but it probably won't be very plot-heavy. If I decide to continue it at all. Just a warning.
> 
> But! If you have any questions about the things I mentioned or are just overall curious, I'm totally open to discussing this more in the comment section.


End file.
